Tom Londa is one the best HR recruiter I have communicated with. He was very quick to reply, clear, friendly, and try his best for the candidate's success. I applied for this role with very little experience in iOS and was obviously not going to get it.
First-round was the Hackerrank containing 20+ questions which many were subjective and few not related to iOS.The second round was entirely a discussion of the first round with the dev manager (observer) & knowledgeable QA lead. Below are a few things which went wrong
- They expect me to remember all the questions which were 1 week old and they had a lack of awareness that candidate cannot access those question after the test and we are busy giving a lot of interviews.
- It was a typical "my answer is right" communication. Communication was mostly one-way, fast with a heavy accent.
- It was very funny that Hackerrank questions were graded like a professor and didn't feel like 3 professionals discussing a topic.
- Interviewer showed snobbishness, lack of flexibility to understand a new kind of answer. At end of the interview, I wasn't asked to ask any questions and left.
Coming from an organization with Google's Editor choice app, my view is
- QA is overengineered and outdated approaches such as analyzing logs on the local machine.
- Having 40 around 80 QA is a poor headcount. Most organization has an average of 3:1 QA to Dev ratio in agile. I don't see any awesome blogs nor open-source initiative with 80 QAs in such a small headcount organization. Adding more headcount makes it worse.
- This is a very obvious case of old employees taking up critical positions and not flexible to new ideas and approaches. The lack of QA leadership is very visible.